Entertainment
Books

Brown: Body imagery helps bring poetic justice to Doom

Doom, from Toronto’s Natalie Zina Walschots, is not a graphic novel. Nor are the compositions in this collection limited to the subject matter indicated by the subtitle, Love Poems For Supervillains.

Instead, Walschots offers readers more than 100 pages of verse inspired by everything DC and Marvel.

As you may expect, I loved this book. Heck, I was sold just on the idea.

There are poems you would expect in a volume such as this, like the lines inspired by Lex Luthor, the Joker, Magneto and Galactus. They are paeans to important places in each imaginative universe, namely Atlantis and Genosha.

And then there are the more ephemeral topics. How could a poet possibly approach the Phantom Zone or the Danger Room, you may ask? Walschots may be the first versifier to have ever done so.

I guess I have always believed there is something poetic about comic books.

And, since comics are full of muscled characters, you won’t be surprised to learn Walschots uses a lot of body imagery.

Of course a poem about General Zod would include a mention of “bruised knees,” since he’s always commanding people to kneel, and the poet pictures Gotham as a city in fever sweats with sewers surging with pus. Catwoman has “blades in her eyes” while the Inhuman Medusa’s living hair twitches with “threads of sentient tensile strength.”

Doom was illustrated by Evan Munday, who has a knack of making characters as morally ugly as the Red Skull somehow seem sexy.

Would a book about heroes be just as evocative? I believe Walschots is up to the challenge.

But while I’m dreaming out loud, I’d love to see her follow up Doom with an issue-driven book. Why not push the envelope even more? Marvel’s tortured continuity has got to be good for a few lines. The same goes for the way DC keeps updating its own history, with efforts such as the New 52 and Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Doom is a promising start . . . There is no end of possibilities for this talented wordsmith.